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When you think of modified car
owners, the name Lenny Boehler has to come to mind. From Old Blue,
Lenny’s familiar coupe, to the current high dollar NASCAR
Featherlite Modified Tour cars of today, Boehler’s cars have run
with, and beaten, the best. Lenny boasted 6 NASCAR modified
championships. Three were won by NEAR Hall of Fame member, Bugsy
Stevens in 1967, 68, and ’69. Wayne Anderson added a fourth in
1994, and Tony Hirschman followed up with two more in 1995 and
’96.
Hall of
Famers Fred DeSarro, Leo Cleary, along with Tommy Cravenho, and
Bruce “Gomer” Taylor each took a turn at wheeling the #3. Doug
Heveron, Mike McLaughlin, and Ron and Ken Bouchard are drivers who
have competed in Len Boehler’s car before heading down south to make
names for themselves in southern NASCAR series. The team, under
Lenny’s son Mike Boehler, continues to be a force on the Featherlite
tour with driver Jerry Marquis.
Len Boehler
was a mechanic who enjoyed taking old parts and finding new ways to
put them into his racecars and make them run faster than the shiny,
high dollar cars that the competitors fielded. An example of Len’s
engineering prowess was his “ball joint coolers”. Lenny took two
Maxwell House coffee cans and some hose clamps and used them to
scoop air to his ball joints. A nice side effect of this system was
that the airflow helped to cool his front brakes. Lenny ran his
operation his way. Lenny’s wife, Janice, remembers getting a letter
from NEAR Hall of Fame member, Jack Arute, Sr., saying the primered
#3 needed a fresh coat of paint before it could be brought back to
Stafford. “The paint didn’t make it go any faster”, laughs Janice.
“So it really didn’t matter.”
Today, we welcome Len Boehler posthumously into the NEAR Hall of
Fame. |
